There are a multitude of current websites that inaccurately portray Margaret Sanger as a racist who wanted to sterilize certain races, based on her involvement with the Eugenics movement. Encountering this assumption, no matter how often I read or hear it, continues to frustrate me. So I was happy to see a recent article by Southern Illinois University professor of social work that examines some of these charges. Gerald V. O’Brian’s “Margaret Sanger and the Nazis: How Many Degrees of Separation,” puts those assumptions to rest by looking at the many misconceptions associated with the “devil,” Margaret Sanger.

Margaret Sanger, 1930Moustache added

Sanger stressed that people should reproduce only when they were mentally and economically fit to do so. Sanger’s main goal was to help people who did not want children. For many, poverty and ill health made it much more difficult to have and care for children. She sought to provide information and access to contraceptives for those individuals, but the impetus generally came from the patient. Since a majority of those unable to afford children were lower class people, including African Americans, people assume she was racist; however, this applied to ANYONE unable to mentally, physically, and economically support their children, and wanted birth control knowledge.

Sanger disagreed with many in the American Eugenics movement who wanted “racially fit mothers” to reproduce as much as possible. As stated above, Sanger felt that women should have the choice to decide to procreate. Though she did not support sterilization based on race, she did agree with the Eugenics movement that people who were not mentally competent to make reproductive decisions, e.g. “morons,” (given the terminology commonly used at the time), should be sterilized. This was also a concept supported by various religious groups and even President Roosevelt..

Looking at the German Eugenics movement, the state pushed women of specific ethnicity to have many children in an effort to “improve” the Aryan race. Sterilization and birth control were only for those seen as unfit by the state. The German definition of “fit” and “unfit” were clearly race based, and did not offer women any choice in the matter. If you were a healthy Aryan woman who did not want children, tough luck! You would receive no means of birth control in Nazi Germany. Essentially women who were racially fit were seen as breeding machines to expand Hitler’s army, a concept Sanger strongly disagreed with. In her 1921, “Eugenic Value of Birth Control,” Margaret Sanger stated,

Not until the parents of the world are thus given control over their reproductive faculties will it ever be possible not alone to improve the quality of the generations of the future, but even to maintain civilization even at its present level. Only by self-control of this type, only by intelligent mastery of the procreative powers can the great mass of humanity be awakened to the great responsibility of parenthood.

Recently on a visit to the New York Historical Society (NYHS), we noticed a small exhibit in the front hall on the history of reform movements in New York that featured Margaret Sanger. The blurb read: “Though best known for her role in promoting women’s access to legal birth control (for which she was indicted for obscenity in 1914) Margaret Sanger was also a proponent of eugenics, suggesting that the fertility of the “unfit” ought to be restricted.” At the Sanger Papers we spend our time going over the entirety of Sanger’s life, so it strikes us as curious (and particularly presentist) that this stage of her career has come to define her so extensively.

In the wake of media attention following the 1917 Brownsville Clinic trial, Margaret Sanger broadened her arguments for birth control in an effort to appeal to a wider audience that included wealthy women, doctors and academics. Sanger added eugenic and public health reasons to support birth control, which essentially overshadowed her earlier feminist and socialist rationales. These conservative arguments had far more widely spread support. Eugenics, in particular, was a respectable scientific field, widely advocated by leading intellectuals, scientists and politicians. Students were taught eugenics in college courses; state fairs had booths educating visitors on “racial hygiene,” and proponents of eugenics populated the faculty of schools like Yale, Stanford and Harvard. Sanger believed that if she could secure the support of the eugenics movement, she could win legitimacy and gain prestige for the birth control movement. Sanger, like many others of her time, was swayed by the arguments of eugenics, though she did not adopt them wholesale. Her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, offers the most detailed explication of her views on eugenics, and shows where she differed with so-called positive eugenics. Her efforts to win the acceptance of the eugenics movement did not succeed, as Sanger and the birth control movement remained at the fringe of the mainstream eugenics movement.

The differences between Sanger and the birth control movement and the academics who lead the eugenics movement have been summarized by the Eugenics Archive site, in part:

Margaret Sanger and leaders of the birth control movement, predominantly women, believed that people should be empowered, by education, to make choices to limit their own reproduction. In a society that frowned on open discussion of sexuality and where physicians knew little about the biology of reproduction, Sanger advocated that mothers be given access to the scientific information needed to thoughtfully plan conception.

Davenport and other eugenic leaders, predominantly men, believed that the state should be empowered, by statute, to control reproduction by whole classes of people they deemed genetically inferior. Eugenicists focused on segregating the “feebly inherited” in mental institutions, ultimately seeking the legal remedy of compulsory sterilization. (They also employed immigration restriction to limit the growth of certain population groups.)

I have been considerably disquieted by the letter you showed me yesterday, suggesting a working alliance between the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League. In my judgement we have everything to lose nothing to gain to such an arrangement.

[The American Birth Control League] is controlled by a group that has be brought up on agitation and emotional appeal instead of on research and education… With this group, we would take on a large quantity of ready-made enemies which it has accumulated, and we would gain allies who, while believing that they are eugenics, really have no conception of what eugenics is and are actually opposed to it.

[At a recent international birth control conference] two members of our advisory council … put through a resolution at the final meeting, urging that people whose children gave promise of being of exceptional value to the race should have as many children, properly spaced, as they felt that they feasibly could. This is eugenics. It is not the policy of the American Birth Control League leaders, who in the next issue of their monthly magazine came out with an editorial denouncing this resolution as contrary to all the principles and sentiments of their organization.

If it is desirable for us to make a campaign in favor of contraception, we are abundantly able to do so on our own account, without enrolling a lot of sob sisters, grand stand players, and anarchists to help us. We had a lunatic fringe in the eugenics movement in the early days; we have been trying for 20 years to get rid of it and have finally done so. Let’s not take on another fringe of any kind as an ornament.

Sincerely,

Paul Popenoe

In 1928, at the height of the popularity of the eugenics movement, this letter makes clear how peripheral Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement were to eugenics, and how much at odds she was with many of its central tenants. Fast forward to 2012, where the dominant interpretation of Sanger’s work is her critical role in the eugenics movement. It is rather ironic that her legacy today has been yoked to a discredited ideological movement that hardly accepted her at the time.

So why did the NYHS accept a portrayal of Sanger that depicts her eugenics period as definitive of her life time of advocacy? In today’s popular discourse, Sanger’s historical legacy has been appropriated by opponents of reproductive rights and used as an easy target to defame and discredit the work that has continued in the almost 50 years since Sanger’s death. Embellishing her role within the eugenics movement is a key feature of this agenda. With a single sentence, the NYHS lent its institutional authority to legitimizing this problematic interpretation. When we asked them, via Twitter, about their curatorial choices, they responded that their exhibit “reveals history’s complexity”. Certainly, history is complex; yet this exhibition piece reveals more about the complexity of the present than that of the past.

Our Facebook feed this week has been overflowing with jokes and outrage about the Michigan State Congress where Rep. Lisa Brown was banned from speaking on the floor after saying “vagina” in a debate over an abortion bill. Brown’s sound response: “It’s an anatomically correct term for woman’s anatomy. It actually exists in Michigan statutes in three different places. This bill was about abortion. That doesn’t happen without a vagina.” Unsurprisingly, male lawmakers’ discomfort about speaking openly about the very bodies they are attempting to regulate is not new. In 1932, Margaret Sanger went to Washington to lobby against a provision in the Comstock Law that categorized birth control information as obscene and punished those who distributed it, including health care professionals (seriously). Below are two passages from her papers that illustrate some of the all-to-familiar attitudes she encountered there.

Sanger lobbying Congress, 1932

American Woman’s Association Award Speech, April 20, 1932:“We found that the great difficulty was misunderstanding. We further found that the great majority of these men were both badly informed and misinformed. Of course, we found that the younger men, some of the newer ones, knew something of the pros and cons of birth control. One could easily know that by the size of their own families. But when it came to asking for a law to allow others to have the same privileges that they had, the subject became a serious one that had to have their due consideration.”

Letter to Mary Hope Macaulay, May 21, 1932:“But Mary dear their arguments grow weaker, they put up a very poor case this time never have we so thoroughly aroused the people as this year. Thousands wrote to Congressmen and oh Mary such letters!! Many of them classics. Just to arouse people to ask, to demand this right makes me feel the victory is near. And oh Mary you would love to see the look on the men’s faces… when I replied to pertinent questions & talked about “douches” — Their faces were scarlet! Poor darlings they wanted to escape but they had to sit & listen to what women endure. I read letter from Mothers & their old tired eyes were moist & I knew they understood & were moved.”

Margaret Sanger has always been a controversial figure. Her radical feminism, associations with eugenicists, and passionate support of birth control riled many both in her lifetime and today. Currently women’s rights are under attack from segments of the American right who are attempting to discredit Margaret Sanger in order to attack the reproductive freedoms she helped establish. The most common approach is to recycle well-worn myths about Sanger, like Michael Steele’s recent claims that Sanger advocated black genocide, or supported the Nazis. (You can find the Sanger Papers’ analysis to these faulty claims here and here). Many haters also insist incorrectly that Sanger was an advocate of abortion. Here are some particularly juicy tweets we encountered while trying to encourage a more historically sound interpretation of Sanger’s legacy:

Much of this vitriol stems from hatred and misunderstanding of Planned Parenthood’s abortion services. As the founder of Planned Parenthood, Sanger is an easy target for these partisans because she is no longer able to speak for herself. Yet Planned Parenthood did not offer abortions until Roe v. Wade in 1973, seven years after Sanger’s death. Although Sanger founded the organization, she had little to do with the practices that they so vehemently contest. They are manipulating the legacy of Sanger to fight contemporary battles and disregarding context and historical accuracy in the process. They need to reimagine Sanger as a racist abortion advocate in order to have her fit into today’s ideological schisms, schisms that hardly existed in her era.

But hatred towards Sanger is nothing new. In her lifetime, she received quite a bit of hate mail, some of which has been preserved in the archive. In the mid-twentieth century, the most outspoken critics of Sanger were Catholics who objected to her public criticism of the Pope and support of family planning. Others were worried about the future of population growth -particularly of white Americans and Europeans- and worried that family planning would weaken these groups. Here is a favorite that we found in the Margaret Sanger Papers:

“Dear Madam: You have been a shameless “murderess on parade” for a long while. However, you never looked more hellishly ludicrous than at present when the government is about to launch a campaign to encourage as many births as possible as has been done for sometime in Europe. Perhaps this will see and end to your shameless debasing of Parenthood. You, if you ever had any real Christian upbringing, must have developed a cast iron conscience to be able to carry on your soul the innumerable times you are guilty of having the Commandment–Thou shalt not kill–broken by poor innocent people who listened to your advice. The average schoolboy or girl knows more about contraceptives than you do and that is well-known; which makes your birth-controllers hopelessly out-dated. If you were a sincere person you would devote your time to something clean worthwhile.” (Aug. 28, 1941, Brooklyn, N.Y. [LCM 50:135].)

If you want to read more on the hate mail that Sanger received in her lifetime, visit our article “Dear Madam, I Abhor You” at the Sanger Papers Newsletter!

You know, we are a pretty laid back group here at the Sanger Papers. Its unusual for vicious debates to break out, but that was before we launched the @SangerPapers Twitter account a few months ago. The Twitter sphere is full of people who are rabidly opposed to Planned Parenthood, and in order to attack the organization, they tend to latch onto historic myths and misrepresentations of its founder, Margaret Sanger. Naturally, in the name of historical accuracy (and feminism), we venture from time to time out into the battlefield of representation, and encounter people who seem profoundly unattached to anything like truth or reason. Sanger undoubtedly did and said enough questionable things in her lifetime, what is the point of making stuff up? Here are some particularly juicy highlights from yesterday’s Twitter debates about Sanger with a right-wing ideologues.

Is meaningful (Twitter) debate possible? Or is it just a forum for two opposed sides to shout about their beliefs? It was clear by the end that Ms. ObamaCzar was not talking about Margaret Sanger at all, but about abortion politics. It’s slightly ironic that Sanger didn’t condone abortion and it wasn’t practiced at Planned Parenthood until after Roe v Wade made it legal in 1973, seven years after her death.

Like this:

How you can help

The Sanger Papers is a non-profit organization (501(c)3), hosted by New York University. Almost all project expenses are covered by grants and private donations. For more information, see our website, or make a donation online today!